Monthly Archives: January 2015

Many businesses run contests on Pinterest but recently, the social media site has revised its rules. Social Media Examiner explains how to run a compliant Pinterest contest.

One EntryPinterest would rather pinners submit only one entry instead of multiple pins. Remember quality over quantity – Pinterest prefers one quality pin that results in high-quality user-generated content.

Hashtags
In order to identify your Pinterest contest content, create a a unique hashtag for your pinners to use. It is important to make it very clear that the winners are a part of your Pinterest competition. Pinterest does allows you to use more than one hashtag.

Landing PagePinterest considers comments from pinners spam even though it is commonly used to boost engagement. A good alternative is to create a landing page separate from Pinterest where you can cover the rules, terms, prizes, and possibly give an example entry.

Judge Sweepstakes
It is discouraged by Pinterest to consider every like, comment, pin, and repin an entry. This new rule also asks that businesses do not ask for votes in the form of pin, repins, likes, or boards. Basically, content should win over random actions.

Be Unique
The best Pinterest contests are different from the norm. Try to put a twist on normal rules to create a truly unique Pinterest contest.

Follow these simple rules and your next Pinterest contest will go “pinningly.”

To many, engagement on Twitter consists of retweets and favorites. According to an article published on Social Media Today, engagement on Twitter is driven by many factors which are listed below.

Social Authority

“Social Authority helps you find, optimize, and engage your Twitter audience. It’s a 1 to 100 point scale that measures a user’s influential content on Twitter.” In order to calculate the number on the scale many things are required. The first, examining the user’s follower count. Once that is obtained, it is then correlated with the number of retweets that the tweet receives. The amount of Social Authority a user’s content creates has an impact on the number of retweets and favorites it is most likely to get. For more information on Social Authority visit https://followerwonk.com/social-authority.

Image

One of the biggest influences on engagement is done by including an image in the tweet that is going to be posted. Although images work great, it important to use them at the right time. Images on Twitter do not have to be use every time a tweet is posted. Using images on twitter is the most effective when it stands out on a Twitter timeline. It is less effective when the image overwhelms the timeline.

Character Count and Time of Day

To Twitter users, it is clear that tweets can only reach a maximum of 140 characters. Increasing character length could lead to more retweets and favorites. Time of day has no impact on the chances of getting at least one retweet. Since Twitter is used as a news feed, many users spend time on the site scrolling and could possibly retweet something that was posted earlier that day. This action could lessen the effect of the newly posted tweet a user is wishing to gain engagement from. Tweeting during peak business hours becomes difficult and it is harder to gain engagement. Therefore, tweets posted in off business hours may be more effective.

Other Factors

Besides the factors described above, there are also other elements that could be added to a tweet to drive more engagement. For example, these factors could be including mentions, hashtags, and links in your tweets. Using one of those elements could influence the gain in the number of retweets and favorites a tweet will receive. Hashtags are the most influential to use in a tweet if a user wants to gain more engagement.

By taking these factors into consideration, a user can gain the most out of their time spent on Twitter. It is important however, to remember to only use mentions, images, hashtags, and links at the right time and place. For more details on Twitter engagement head over to Social Media Today!